Any diet considered to be beneficial to multiple sclerosis sufferers is like most other treatments, a moot point. Furthermore every individual is different, and a different dietary regime is likely to be required in each case. It is often a case of trial and error to find out what works for you bearing in mind that any dietary change should be given two or three months to see if it will work.
There are two widely accepted diets The Swank Diet and one devised by Roger MacDougall now known as the Palaeolithic Diet.
The latter focuses on excluding gluten and casein, while the former also advocates low animal fats. Gluten is found in all flour based foods; bread, pasta, pastry and breakfast cereals and beer. Casein is the main protein in milk. So all dairy products should be avoided.
The Swank Diet stipulates that all red meat should be omitted during the first year and kept to an absolute minimum thereafter. It further advises a daily intake of cod-liver oil and vitamin supplements.
There are more, and many variations of the above. But I would advise taking nutritional advice, as extreme diets can, in themselves, be harmful whether the diet be for a condition like multiple sclerosis or simply for weight loss purposes.
Incidentally, The Palaeolithic Diet is so named as it is believed to be based on what old stone age humans would have eaten, having no access, of course, to modern, refined foods. Humans have been around for several million years and have evolved to digest hunter-gatherer food. Modern foods have only been around for a few thousand years, so our bodies have had insufficient time to adequately adapt to digesting cereals or high-fat meats.
I have seen the spelling Paleolithic elsewhere on the web, which according to my Concise Oxford Dictionary, is a variation of the usual spelling of the word.
I have visited many web sites advising on dietary guidelines for MS sufferers. For the most part these sites, and magazine articles for that matter, seem to focus on what not to eat, rather than on what we should eat. I have just purchased the two books to the right in the hope that they will approach the subject in a much more positive way. I shall report back in due course.
On this note, I was reading an article in New Pathways magazine suggesting we should avoid tomatoes, oranges, aubergine and peppers as these may be inflammatory. What! The available menu gets shorter every day.
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